I. Lucid Dreaming

Shortly before I was to leave the South Pole after a three-week residency to photograph "the liminal space between life support architecture and extreme environment," as promised in my NSF Artists and Writers grant application, I was having one of my last meals in the galley. I was feeling sad that I had to leave the "off planet" space of the polar plateau and upset not to have had more time to work. As I pondered the hierarchies between scientific and creative research, one of the astronomers, an annual visitor to the Pole, joined me. A cosmologist, his power point presentation had been one of my favorites. Unlike any other of the science lectures I'd seen, his was illustrated with stills from Hollywood films. Knowing that I was destined as cargo on the next plane out of the Pole, he informed me, from his perch of experience, that the moment I left the continent, both the ice, as well as my time there, would seem like a dream.

However, the opposite became true. Almost four years later when I think back to Antarctica, especially the Pole, it still feels very real to me, strangely uncorrupted and unlike the way memories otherwise almost always become. Perhaps it's because of the disparity between my photographic images and the visual memory of lived experience echoed, for example, in the discrepancy I experienced between the enhanced peripheral vision that physically occurs at the bottom of the world versus the limitations of a 19th century mechanical eye. This divergence in modes of seeing and image making, of course, is fodder for many theoretical treatises on photography. When framing images it's necessary to understand that both the act of photographing as well as the reading of photographs is not solely (nor truly) optically based. From an artist's end, the aesthetic negotiation of this myriad of semiotic, conceptual, and paradoxical elements is one of the most pleasurable parts of making work. But shortly after arriving at the Pole, work ceased to be fun, as I realized that I had to seriously revise my pre-conceived plans—a phenomenon common to many artistic endeavors dependent on "place"—causing the pleasure of creative play to evaporate those first few days along side my ability to breathe in the extreme altitude.

As my body molecularly adjusted to the extreme environment and the cowboy culture of ice adventure, I found that everything—landscape, structures, people—became rapidly mundane. In retrospect, I now realize that this adjustment was both an artistic realignment as well as a necessary element of survival. Without question, it is impossible not (nor is it a bad thing) to be emotionally and visually overcome by the force and expanse of the Antarctic landscape even when one is conscious of the many pitfalls perilously situated beneath the lure of the exotic and the imaginary. However, it was not until I shifted over to a quotidian vantage point (alongside a state of awe) that I was able to start thinking photographically, and by this I mean the ability to observe political geographies and psychological dislocation in the everyday.

As many critics have pointed out over the years, in cultures like ours, so deeply immersed in mediascapes, our idea of reality is often photographically pre-determined. For example, tourists generally have in mind what they want their pictures to look like before they arrive to a place they have never been before. Although only about 10,000 people have been to the South Pole since it was first explored, per capita it may be more photographed than Disney World. I did not encounter one person, support personnel or researchers, who did not have a camera. Once my identity was established ("it's the photographer"), many people with whom I talked had definite ideas of what I should be photographing. When not being schooled, I would stand in fascination sipping tea, looking out the galley windows, watching others photograph: NSF visitors with only a few days on site, National Geographic/Discovery Channel film crews with only a week's time, struggling against the (unseasonably cold) -78°F, trying to negotiate the rickety surface of the ice while simultaneously vacuuming the landscape with video cams and digital SLRs for recognizable icons and dramatic narratives.

During this idle beginning to my residency—where loss of creative play was compounded by my natural lack of heroic impulse—I found myself plagued by the same dream for several nights running. I would dream I was in the military, an outer space combat unit but not with the glamorous plots and casts of the SciFi Channel's more popular programs. Since I was the lowest on the pecking order, my commanding officer would nightly bark at me: "Samaras, suit up, get out there, and set up our space tents!" Grinding my teeth as I looked out of the ship's protective bubble, I would reluctantly put on my gear because, if I didn't, insubordination would result in certain death. Once outside, danger mixed with abstraction and I was overcome by a myriad of colors. White, though, was nowhere to be seen. However, when my talent returned in real life and I got down to making images, my unconscious supplanted this dream with one of grizzly people on prison work crews, somewhere on an unidentifiable planet in a far future, endlessly patching and pounding the walls of freezing corridors.

These dreams reveal, in part, my aesthetic preoccupation with SF,science/speculative fiction, mostly as it pertains to how the U.S. dreams itself at various junctures. Given that SF is a literary genre central to the United States, some have commented, such as writer Claire Phillips, that perhaps SF is to this country what magic realism is to parts of Latin America. Although preceded and influenced by the writings of the British 19th century futurists, U.S. science fiction was first formalized in 1926 with the publication of Hugo Gernsback's magazine,Amazing Stories.[1] Over the decades, SF has evolved (as well as de-evolved) past Gernsback's initial editorial dictates that all stories in the magazine must include accurate portrayals of technology as well as masculine heroic trajectories. The title of the series of works I did in Antarctica, V.A.L.I.S. (vast active living intelligence system), borrows its title from the decidedly anti-heroic, psychologically-centric science fiction work of Philip K. Dick, writings which are often populated by failed men and underscore the fact that technology is, in and of itself, dumb, and that intelligence, whether organic, mechanical, or a combination of the two, is subject to multiple forms of symbolic order and slippage.[2]

Figure 1 Connie Samaras
Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Although Dick's V.A.L.I.S. is part of a semi-autobiographical trilogy related to his religious conversion in later years, my appropriation of his title was more out of a shared interest in the overall ideas that run throughout Dick's writings of transcendence and technology, the ability to perceive multiple timelines and realities, and the ever shifting membrane between fiction and the real world. Part of what interested me at the Pole are the different ways in which the U.S., since mid-century, has architecturally envisioned both the future and the colonizing of spaces where there are no indigenous peoples. While the U.S. station is optimally positioned should the non-sovereign Antarctic treaty unravel, few countries can afford to build at the South Pole given the constant drift and movement of the ice. No matter how smart the engineering, ice covers any built environment there in 40 or so years. Moreover, the geographic center of the Pole is also in constant flux. Even if a building could last more than a century, within three decades it would no longer be near the geographic center. While at the South Pole, I felt a poetic relief as I observed and documented the geological timeline indifferently erasing attempts to colonize the polar plateau. However, witnessing the ultimate trumping of the ice over occupation also left me with an overwhelming feeling of taking on a project that could not be completed. At first somewhat paralyzing, I later came to (once again) realize that there was no whole to be had (the mental space of empire) but rather the more "realistic" approach was to chart the shifting juxtapositions between landscape and built environment as fragmented and momentary.

Figure 2 Connie Samaras
Detail Figure 1, panel 1 from Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

In some ways this was an intentional counterpoint to the typical, historical impulse to photograph such vast landscapes panoramically. For example, one often sees photographs of the Pole shot with a "fisheye," the widest of lenses, an understandable inclination. Because photography is driven by realism (much contemporary art photography has been about disrupting this assumption), the visual desire is to capture as much of the vista as possible into a single frame. The result is hardly realistic. The unnatural bending around of the image caused by the fisheye's optics (as though the curvature of the planet is wrapping itself in the opposite direction) only underscores the artificiality of any form of representation. This normalized lure of the panorama can also be attributed to its longstanding history as the first Western virtual tourist space. Two hundred years ago, Europeans paid to immerse themselves in tunnels of painted panoramas of places to which they could never travel. The South Pole, a location accessible to only an elite few, seems to "naturally" lend itself to a form of representation developed in an era when the majority of Europeans rarely ever traveled more than a few kilometers from home.

Figure 3 Connie Samaras
Detail Figure 2, panel 2 from Amundsen-Scott Station Phase III (triptych)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Although not shot as panoramas, most of the photographs in the V.A.L.I.S. series are printed in mural size. The images are also formally constructed using a type of abstraction reminiscent of mid-century U.S. modernist architecture and painting. Most are shot with a long lens in order to play to the disorienting sense of scale between the landscape and structures that occurs when buildings are viewed close-up.

Figure 4 Connie Samaras
Dome Interior
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

The images are also composed to appear as alternating filmstrips of abstraction and realism, as a means to visually entangle the binary of real world and fabrication. Although I draw somewhat from the style of contemporary German photography first associated with Bernd and Hilla Becher, and sometimes termed "deadpan," my interest is more in the paradoxical and interdependent relationships between documentary and the imaginary than it is to construct a wholly unsentimental image.[3] Yet, some of the images, such as the triptych of the new Amundsen-Scott Station under construction, do appear "cold" and lacking in emotion (see Figure 1, Figure 2 and Figure 3). Conversely, others, such as the "Dome Interior," appear "warmer," but no less visually confusing (see Figure 4). The reason for the difference in semiotic temperatures between photographs is related to the variation in design and tropes of modernity during the particular decade in which a given station was erected.

II. Back to the Future

Figure 5 Connie Samaras
Buried Fifties Station
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Since the mid 20th century, when the U.S. first began to seriously squat the region, there have been three stations built at the South Pole. The first, constructed by the military, was a series of modest wooden structures not unlike those pictured in the 1951 film version of The Thing, where aliens and humans duke it out at the North Pole.[4] Never removed, these buildings are now almost entirely iced over, thus my image is an aerial photo of where the fifties station once stood (see Figure 5). Built at the start of the Cold War, the exposed vulnerability of these simple wooden modular units personifies the theme of that era's Thing—"keep watching the skies" for an externalized "threat" to a fictionally coherent American "lower 48." Additionally, if one watches early film footage of soldiers assembling these low-slung wooden kits (the walls often the same height as the troops), the unassuming design for the (then) future "space" colonization bears none of the markings of present day hyper consumer economy. Instead, it harks back to the simple mail order housing kits sold at the end of the 19th century by Montgomery Ward to growing westward populations settling areas newly cleansed of indigenous Americans.

Figure 6 Connie Samaras
Dome and Tunnels
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

The next station, perhaps the most iconic one, is the Buckminster Fuller Dome built in the early 70s and now in the process of being "decommissioned." Its interior set of red buildings have already been removed (see Figure 6). In a sense, this edifice embodies the legacies of contemporaneous social change movements, predominantly Fuller's utopic (thus somewhat problematic) environmentalist vision for the collective stewardship of spaceship earth ("we are all astronauts")—one that emphasizes individual responsibility, the power and primacy of design, humanist ideology, and technology as the force of ultimate liberation.[5] It's interesting to consider that the Dome was designed and built during the height of political activism in the U.S., including the development of separatist movements among women, queers and people of color, as well a highly visible anti-war movement critical of U.S. imperialism and the then new war technologies like Napalm. The humanistic aspects of Fuller's beliefs were, at the time, do doubt comforting to those invested in the ongoing project of American modernity, where the "good of mankind" and scientific rationality go hand in hand and where the foundation of these ideas, masculinity and whiteness, remain normalized. All this said, when compared to its box-like, relatively enormous replacement, there was an undeniable magic to being inside the Dome with its simultaneous layers of inside and out. Although the then "next" new and improved look of the future, the Buckminster Fuller design is almost as a modest as its predecessor both in its human scale and the simple durable design of interlocking triangles—a feature I employed in mirroring the image I took of the dome's main living berths, focusing on the refrigerator-door escape hatches (fire exits) at the back of each compartment (see Figure 4). And despite the interior's initially plain look, small individual design interventions abounded, especially in the sleeping quarters. It was telling that the upper echelon of the station's management, having first choice between quarters in the new station or the Dome, all chose the latter as their home.

Figure 7 Connie Samaras
Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

The new Amundsen-Scott station, now nearing full completion, was designed in the 90s by the Hawaiian sustainable architecture firm, Ferraro Choi with construction commenced at the start of the new millennium. The most ambitious architectural project ever undertaken at the Pole, it is an enormous structure, many times larger than any of the previous stations. It is a singular, fully enclosed two-story four-winged building built on pillars that will eventually be used to raise the station against the inevitable ice drift. Gone are the human scale, intimate feel, and the sensed relationship between human habitat and extreme climate. In contrast to the Dome and the temporary Quonset huts out on the ice near the cargo area built to house workers, those inside the new station feel safely tucked in a technological bubble.

Figure 8 Connie Samaras
Tunnels and Cargo
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

The interior itself feels like a cross between interchangeable non-places like LAX and Southern California shopping malls, mixed with a set design for a Star Trek episode. Both the design and the construction materials, particularly in the sleeping areas, are engineered to repel personal touches. In contrast to the Dome, the design of the Amundsen-Scott berths resolutely conveys that all traces of a given occupant will automatically be disappeared once she or he leaves the quarters with only the timeless presence of the building remaining. Most imposing though is the outside of the station, which has become consistently more imposing since my 2004 residency, now that it has been "skinned" over with a black patina. Resembling a stealth bomber, it hardly seems ironic that Raytheon, the world's largest weapon manufacturer currently holds the logistics contract for running the U.S. stations in Antarctica while Marriott (during my stay) was in charge of the food services.

Perched like a black alien vessel on the center of the South Pole, the Amundsen-Scott station is ready for its pre-visualized long shot. Its predecessor, the Bucky Dome, because of its human scale and idealistic architectural principles emphasizing a fluid interdependence between nature and culture, appeared modestly partnered with the landscape. By contrast, the new station's imposing design evokes the kind of science fiction imagery specific to U.S. mainstream media, where far future space exploration, technology and the military inexorably intertwine. The new station also typifies, despite its remote and exotic location, the kind of massive, global hyper capital building projects currently being undertaken in cities worldwide, where surveillance, military and entertainment technologies are architecturally imbedded and woven together.

The idea of the South Pole as a place where the future can be imagined has great appeal and lure. It's become increasingly difficult to imagine different kinds of futures and other kinds of social arrangements than the one held out by corporate capitalism. With the increasing threat of ecological disaster, Antarctica, and the seeming pristine purity of its landscape, has grown in visibility in the mainstream imagination, especially among the normally geographically impaired U.S. population. There is a kind of nostalgia at foot that is more than just a longing for a perfect past that never existed or a yearning for new territories to conquer with technological prowess. In part, Antarctica's recent popularity as an icon of an extreme and final purity in nature is about a desire to retrieve and recall the interdependent relationship between the earth and its inhabitants, one that has been paved over, poisoned, or been divided up among competing corporations and their host governments. The South Pole, as locus of extreme remove from humanity, and as a location, since the 1950s, for increasingly elaborate and futuristic stations, embodies the contradictions of contemporary globalization and environmental awareness. The fact though that the "look" of future American expansion at the South Pole must be redesigned every three or four decades ultimately underscores the cultural and political preoccupations of a given present as it immediately folds into the past versus the desired representation of a prescient and timeless nationalism. While photographing there, I could not help but be haunted by a William Gibson story "The Gernsback Continuum," itself a ghost story about futurism past.[6] The plot revolves around a male photographer who has been commissioned by a European publisher to shoot pictures of U.S. "futurist architecture" from the 30s and 40s. While driving through California, he begins to find himself hallucinating pieces of these once future visions in his own present. Like fata morganas, they visually hover overhead on a simultaneous timeline, throwing into stark contrast the void and geological drift of the desert landscape.

III. Into the Void

Figure 9 Connie Samaras
Antennae Field South Pole
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Although the ideas of blankness, the imaginary, and the mundane were integral to constructing the images, I also did not want to visually shy away from the utter beauty and power of the polar plateau, despite the fact that beautiful landscapes are a representational trap given the long cultural and historical use of such images in defining nation and class. Picturing the landscape through a close-up lens, where its grandeur is seamed with the built environment, reveals the ice as an entity in and of itself rather than simply a void being filled. It also exposes the empty slate beneath the shifting cultural markings of U.S. nationalism repeatedly being dropped down onto this place. Photographing pure landscape however was a more difficult proposition. One approach was to reveal the fragility of the built environment in such an extreme climate, as in the aerial picture of communication antennae and their shadows thinly cast onto the polar plateau (see Figure 9). Another was to frame close-up sections of the plateau to create visual confusion and underscore the failure of optics to read images. For example, one photograph appears first as an image of a black sea against a sky at sunset. Taken in full twenty-four hour sunlight, the black sea is actually a close up of where night is falling somewhere else on the globe and the "sunset" is in fact contrail pollution from the transport planes landing at the Pole (see Figure 10).

Figure 10 Connie Samaras
Night Divide and Contrails
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

However as most artists know, once work is put out into world it is expected that, along with an understanding of the artist's intent, there will also inevitably be symbolic slippage, misreadings, and/or willful mistranslations of one's work. Still it was almost a hallucinatory experience when, six months later, during an exhibition of the first photographs I printed from V.A.L.I.S. (see Figure 2, Figure 3 and Figure 6), I watched a crowd of men armed with cell phone and digital point-and shoot-cameras photographically correct the spatial and narrative dislocation I had aesthetically built into the photographs.

This particular exhibition was in a Los Angeles' municipal gallery where a large group of contemporary photographs on architecture were being exhibited to coincide with the re-opening of the newly refurbished Frank Lloyd Wright house adjacent to the galleries. There was a massive crowd in attendance, out for an entertaining Sunday afternoon at the city's cultural park. As soon as the show opened, I saw a large number of people gravitate to the image of the sinking Buckminster Fuller Dome (see Figure 6). Soon after I noticed a few men, white and middle-aged, take out their mobile phones or pocket digital cameras. Next, several set their devices to "video" and moved into the photograph, starting to "walk through" the photographic terrain as though they were actually there. Soon others began "re-photographing" as well. Some set their cameras to wide-angle format as they moved in closer to "correct" my close-up image into a panorama. Others diligently photographed a series of small linear sections that I assumed they would later tile into a panorama with (unlike my image) a more coherent horizon line. One man was particularly industrious: clearly armed with an empty and sizeable memory chip, he held his mobile at arm's length and, for several minutes, slowly video taped every inch of the picture as though he was heroically trudging across the ice. I stood behind him the entire time watching the bright screen vacuuming the void into a "meaningful" tourist adventure. By the time he finished, I felt as though I'd been transported into a dream state, one where narratives of manifest destiny and masculine heroics live timelessly on, inured to any kind of intervention.

Lisa Bloom in her book Gender on Ice is one of the few to discuss the differing ways in which gender, race, and sexuality are constructed in the narratives of the early polar explorers and the institutions, private and state, who supported them. While in Antarctica almost a century and two more waves of feminism later, I found these questions even more confusing. The adage, "everything changes, everything stays the same," kept running through my head like a stuck commercial jingle. Although men still outnumber women in terms of personnel, there was a high percentage of women workers in all kinds of jobs from, for example at the South Pole, heavy equipment operators all the way up to summer station manager. When it came to scientists, women are still, as is the case at my own university and most others in the States, very much in a minority. Also, the ice was not the only white expanse. Coming from Southern California, it was shocking to be in a population, scientists and personnel, where there were hardly any people of color and where, like the 50s in the U.S., it was somehow acceptable. Unexpectedly I found small enclaves of my gay sisters, more so at McMurdo than at the Pole. I also encountered a kind of queerness in the straight culture. For one, the physical nuclear family does not exist on the ice, thus paving the way for imagining other kinds of social arrangements. The stories I heard about dating rituals (where women often have the upper hand because of their fewer numbers), sexual experimentation, and the phenomenon of "ice husbands and wives" (relationships that take place only in Antarctica's austral summers where the spouses left at home are substituted with their ice equivalents) made me recall the period, post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS, when queer culture was starting to have a visibly bending effect on normative heterosexuality. In terms of class, because it's enormously expensive to send and house anyone for any purpose in Antarctica, facilities, personnel come from all walks of life, from Alaskans (mostly white) looking for employment during their winter season to people, for example, with degrees in medical anthropology willing to take jobs washing dishes in order to simply be there. The off-planet feel is particularly strong at the Pole. Because you are at an ellipse to orbiting satellites, there's very little time in the day to call out or go online. Unlike the few dismal channels aired in the main galley at McMurdo (which included Fox News and a channel produced by the military), there was no media at the Pole. It felt as wonderfully far as one can get from the endless assaults of consumer economy, yet the faint hum of Raytheon corporate management thousands of miles away in Denver pervaded the atmosphere.

The notion of the heroic is also complicated. There are, of course, those laboring under the weight of their own egos and conventional ideas of masculinity. But, especially among the support staff, there are many others, both women and men, to whom one can trust one's life, people who see survival as a matter of interdependency and heroic actions as a potential necessity, not a Romantic narrative of winners, losers and an audience of hero worshippers.

Figure 11 Connie Samaras
Angelic States—Event Sequence: StarTrek Casino Las Vegas
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

The feminist gesture behind my photographs is not always overtly evident in the initial reading of the images. This is especially so as here I avoided photographing figures because it is often easier to read architectural narratives without picturing inhabitants. For some time now, regardless of subject matter, I've been interested in the idea of positionality, one case in point being the shifting constructions and circumstances of the body behind the camera. In one prior project on U.S. urban landscape (Angelic States—Event Sequence, 1998-2003), almost all the places I photographed were off limits to cameras. I dealt with this by playing into the gendered assumptions surrounding the person people thought they were seeing behind the camera. For example, when guards approached me for photographing inside a casino, I took on the persona of a timid housewife whose husband had assured her that photography was allowed (see Figure 11). In Antarctica, in my position as "the photographer," I anticipated that how some would perceive me would be dependent on whatever technology I was seen using. For example, although many were respectful of the fact that I knew what I was doing, when I began to work first with the smaller cameras I brought, a number of "polies" offered unsolicited opinions as to how I was using the wrong lens or the incorrect camera body. Part of it might have had to do with the fact that despite being queer and white, I was still the wrong silhouette and shade (short, olive, and curvy) for the explorer's body and the polar gear issued to me. I may have looked more like Kenny on South Park than Ernest Shackleton, but when I brought out the 4x5 camera and black focusing cloth, thus "borrowing" the mantle of Robert Scott's official photographer George Herbert Ponting, it was only then that the unwanted suggestions stopped.

Figure 12 Connie Samaras
Dome Library
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

Aside, however, from how the body is enacted while taking pictures, I also made a decidedly feminist edit when taking photographs of the then two libraries: the one that was soon to be dismantled in the Dome and the other that was being newly assembled in the Amundsen-Scott building. A comparison of the libraries reveals the differing cultural histories of the structures. The Dome's collection was a diverse range of books from pulp to experimental fiction, from western classics to political theory. At the time I was there, the new library was not as eclectic and, in stark contrast, had Christian religious texts peppering the shelves no matter what the category. However, the embedded focal point of my images was how contemporary women authors had been mis-categorized in both collections. In the Dome library, shelved under the "Romance" section was Kathy Acker's In Memoriam to Identity while in the new station Donna Haraway's Primate Visions had been placed under "Wildlife/Nature" (see Figure 12 and Figure 13).

Figure 13 Connie Samaras
Amundsen-Scott Library
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

There is a sort of intractable neutrality when it comes to discussing and imagining Antarctica. A few scholars, like Bloom, have rigorously grappled with the erasures, untruths, origins, and functions of such a perception. But I was puzzled by my own experience of it while there, as though I was a metal particle being drawn to a magnetic field. Part of it I could attribute to the relentless culture of rationality in scientific enclaves. However, because I was interested in the unconscious architectural messages—Why space operates as the source of SF inspiration? Why not the heterotopias of Samuel Delaney, the critiques of scientific investigation of Stansilaw Lem, the near futures of Octavia Butler where change is the only constant, or the gender twists of James Tiptree Jr.?—I didn't feel that my immersion in a culture of objectivity fully explained this pull. In retrospect, part of it has to do with the fact that any political questions including gender are endlessly open ones, subject to historical and cultural flux.

Looking at and imaging the Antarctic landscape as a living force has different meaning in this era of potential ecological collapse than it did even fifteen years ago. Younger feminists today (and I don't mean this monolithically, as though there ever was or ever will be some singular strand of thought) have a very different and perhaps even more horrific set of problems before them than someone like myself who first came to feminism as a young woman during the U.S. second wave. Currently, the subject of landscape is beginning to be a very different representational prospect among artists such as Joyce Campbell than it was for me when I started out in photography, in the 80s during the theoretical rise of post-structuralism. Ultimately, I found myself in that seemingly timeless space of "gender divide" so eloquently articulated by the feminist theorist Ann Snitow.[7] There is no singular comfortable occupation of any one side of the binaries of feminist debates. We are always having to negotiate and re-negotiate ideological space. My performative approach to the photographer's body may have made me feel like a bit of spy, the way one acquaintance, an F-to-M transgendered person, once described to me what it was like when he first stood among men and heard how they really talked about women. But I also found myself wanting to forget about gender, more specifically, not having to first define myself as a woman in response to being on the ice.

To "forget" fully would have, of course, been regressive if not impossible. But I found myself thinking back to (as well as taking comfort from) an essay I read many years ago by the brilliant cultural critic, and feminist journalist, the late Ellen Willis.[8] It was an early piece on the potential trap of identity politics (why must one always first name the identity given to them by their oppressor in order to undo it?). In this discussion, Willis suggested that considerations of cultural particularities do not necessarily exclude one from reflecting on ideas of human connectivity. In some ways, even given the possible slippery slope to a liberal humanism, thinking back to Willis' words helped paved the way for the videos I produced which, in a necessary contrast to the photographs, trace "life."

Figure 14 Connie Samaras
Video still from Untitled (Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica)
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

One installation is a large projection of a Weddell seal oxygenating, a simple unedited loop (see Figure 14). At first the viewer sees a close up of the ice hole, although to some it looks like an ice glacier. Unexpectedly a Weddell seal breaks through and begins pulling in air, closing her eyes as she breathes and then opening them to look directly into the camera. The preliminary response to this 700 pound mammal is almost always "how cute." But after four minutes of watching non-stop breathing (going against the highly edited grain of mainstream nature films), it is almost impossible not to think about one's own breathing and immediate physical space. Juxtaposed with this is a smaller projection of a worker (an ice hole driller) on the cargo plane which is transporting both of us off the ice and back to New Zealand (see Figure 15). I shot him while he was sleeping in full polar gear in the back bay of the cargo plane (except for me, there were no women to point my camera at). Focusing on his slow breathing and framed to mimic the genre of horror science fiction films, what comes across is the fragility of the human body even within context of the prosthetic devices of technology.

Figure 15 Connie Samaras
Video still from installation Sleeping Man on Transport Plane
digital print
Courtesy of the artist

In fall 2007 I showed V.A.L.I.S. at Gallery de Soto in downtown Los Angeles, in what was almost an ideal space for the work: an upstairs in which to install the photographs, a downstairs space for the video installations. As one walked around looking at the images, the sounds from the videos (the seal breathing mixed in with the rumbles of the cargo plane) floated up from below, an audible subterranean. But as one stood downstairs, watching the films, it was hard to tell which level had the greater claim to the space of dreams.

Endnotes

1. The literary trajectory of SF in the U.S. is much more complicated than I can talk about here. However, for an excellent cultural history of science fiction (U.S. and British) and an in-depth discussion of how the genre consistently reinvents itself, see Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005. [Return to text]

2. Philip K. Dick, Valis. New York: Vintage, 1991. [Return to text]

3. For a further discussion on "deadpan" photography, as well as an overall introduction to contemporary art photography, see Charlotte Cotton, Photography as Contemporary Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. [Return to text]

4. The Thing, Dir. Christian Nyby. Perf. Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, Robert Cornthwaite and Douglas Spencer. Winchester Pictures, 1951. In John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing, the characters have been "relocated" to Antarctica. Released at the start of the Reagan era, fittingly the script is reconfigured so that the greater "threat" now comes from within than externally from above. [Return to text]

5. For a recent and varied discussion of Buckminster Fuller's continuing legacy, see the series of articles published in Artforum, November, 2008. [Return to text]

6. William Gibson, "The Gernsback Continuum" in Burning Chrome. Ed. Bruce Sterling. New York: Ace Books, 1986. Also, see Luckhurst for a discussion of this short story's function as a kind of manifesto for the then emerging cyberpunk genre, pp. 204. [Return to text]

7. Ann Snitow, "A Gender Diary" in Conflicts in Feminism. Eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller. New York: Routledge, 1990. [Return to text]

8. Ilene Philipson, Henry Louis Gates, Ellen Willis, and Arthur Waskow, "What's the Big I.D.? The Politics of the Authentic Self" in Tikkun 6:6 (1991): 51-64. [Return to text]